Chapter Text
The tide ebbs and he comes to, with the continuous hush of waves meeting shore in the periphery of his consciousness. Water smooth like glass and black like ink engulfs his resting form and laps at his limbs.
He’s laid here for a while, he notes drowsily, body and mind slumbering and fallow like untended land. The air is cool, a fresh and soothing breeze, and his bleary eyes shut close again as he lets his torpid mind drift in the dark.
Weak specters of light bravely travail the undulating swell, casting a glow over the surface of the dark water that merges with the surrounding darkness. A sanctuary for the soul.
But the lullaby of sloshing waves carries him to a somber verdict.
If this is death, he finds it strangely akin to life. Void of anything that might rouse the pulse in his veins. What a disappointment this, too, turned out to be.
Air pushes wearily through the reeds in his throat as Sukuna sighs. He’s barely cognizant but when he inhales again, a scowl draws his brows together. Shivering, he wades through the fog in his head and blinks. Something is dreadfully wrong.
The wings of his lungs push against a too small ribcage.
As soon as the revelation dawns, his instincts jolt him wide awake and he staggers to his feet.
A wheeze pushes past his lips as he claws at his chest with a desperate hand. Suddenly, everything feels too tight, too cramped, and the previously pleasant fog in his head thickens and bloats.
Panic creeps into his thoughts, and this sensation is so abhorrent his fingers spur into action with renewed strength, to loosen the vice, this cage that clamps around his lungs. But his chest constricts further when another realization hits him like a train: he doesn’t have enough limbs.
A frustrated roar rips from his throat. Sukuna whirls around, mind racing in tandem with the incensed beats of his heart. The only one who would be capable of whipping his blood into such a frenzy is—
No, he refuses to entertain such a reality. He stills his hands, smooths them over cloth that feels vaguely familiar…
Sukuna sucks in a sharp breath. His fingers tense around Yuuji’s hoodie.
“This is hell.”
Just as his disgust crests and threatens to engulf him entirely, a light pierces through the dark of this wretched place. Its cold yet gentle brilliance unfurls in his vision, scattering the glut of rage fogging his mind, and he is briefly reminded of the moon descending to swathe the earth in the embrace of her light.
But embers of his anger still linger, prowling the edges of his consciousness, uncertain and wary, as he watches a figure emerge from the light.
“Sorry,” a voice says, and Sukuna wants to throw up. “Not yet.”
“But I’m dead.” He has to be. He needs to be.
“No.” Yuuji steps forward as he raises his index finger to his lips and then extends his arm, sweeping it in a wide arch as he points at somewhere in the nothingness.
The waves stop and through the ensuing silence Sukuna can hear something like blood that would trickle from a bereaved corpse and join the coagulated puddle beneath it with a drip. With a frown, he concludes he’s been bottle-fed cursed energy, his remains nursed back to health like a broken bird.
“Was quite the struggle to get you back inside me without anyone noticing… but I managed.”
“You ate me?”
“Well, I had to.” Yuuji sheepishly averts his eyes and rubs the back of his neck. “I’m lucky I could still get a hold of you, you were fading so fast.”
Lucky?
Sukuna curls his lip in disgust. “I told you, boy,” he snarls. “I don’t want your pity. Leave me be. I lost.”
Yuuji drops the act and straightens, an unreadable expression on his face. He looks a little older now, sharper and experienced, as he raises his chin and looks Sukuna squarely in the eyes.
“Then I can do whatever I want with your corpse, can’t I?”
Sukuna has never—Yuuji shouldn’t know about this detail of his principles. Even when they were still sharing the same body, Sukuna had made sure they remained separate entities. He had allowed no peeking behind the curtain, much less an emulsion of their individual essences.
Under ordinary circumstances, he wouldn’t care if the boy had gained an exclusive insight into his mind. But now, it feels like they were conjoined, their souls clumsily fastened together by the iron thread spun from the cursed fate that had linked them in the first place.
Through this conduit, now, Sukuna feels, they share even more.
How much further had this brat’s understanding of the soul evolved? How precise? How well did he know him? How much could he discern? What contours had he touched and manipulated to his will?
That disgusting copper taste of panic seeps onto Sukuna’s tongue again as this deluge of uncertainty barrels down on his senses. He attempts to expand his consciousness, his soul, to conjure the might of the ideals he has staked the value of his life on, the self he has cultivated into the moving disaster that prompted lessers to worship his will and the mighty to fill his belly.
It ought to be as boundless as the space he inhabits here. But the moment he meets the edges of a barrier, his face contorts and he roars.
Black water splashes as Sukuna rushes forward and clamps his hands around Yuuji’s neck. He’ll choke the life out of him, he thinks, and when Yuuji is gone he shall be free once more. One way or the other.
His knuckles turn white and his arms begin to shake with exertion, but this fragile throat refuses to budge beneath the force of his anger.
And Yuuji watches him with a placid expression, like he believes Sukuna cannot harm him. Their eyes meet and something incommunicable passes between them. Bile rises in Sukuna’s own throat, dismayed they stand at eye level now.
“Don’t you dare drag me down to your level,” he hisses. He would sooner die than live in captivity. He heaves, and then lets go and shoves the boy away.
“If you’re good,” Yuuji says, immediately gaining his footing back, “then I’ll grant you more freedom. Maybe even your body. I promise.”
But there is freedom, right in his grasp. The thought pulses through Sukuna’s mind, igniting a fierceness that surges through his veins. He lifts his hand, flat and triumphant.
In the split second he locks eyes with Yuuji again, recognition sparks in them. But, unexpectedly, his posture relaxes ever so slightly, untroubled by the memory of Sukuna’s hand around his heart, how he had tossed it away like trash.
That blatant display of indifference only emboldens Sukuna. He plunges his hand into his own chest, tearing through flesh and bone. He routs and digs for his heart as black liquid spills from the gash and runs down his torso in rivulets.
It’s as though his cursed power is bleeding out of him, slipping around his fingers as they search, frantically, relentlessly, for the one thing that will secure his freedom.
Sukuna’s face falls.
His fingers grasp at empty space, slipping through the void where his heart ought to be. But there is nothing but that cursed liquid. A cold tendril of blank fear worms its way into his mind. That fragile little organ—isn’t he alive?—he should feel it.
“No…” he grinds out.
As his hand moves faster, the truth becomes clearer and thus, more horrifying. He squeezes his eyes shut. His breath comes out in uneven gasps. His heart is gone, lost somewhere within the depths of his altered existence. Or perhaps, it was never there to begin with.
The freedom he had glimpsed slips further and further away.
However, Sukuna refuses to cease his efforts. His hand picks up his gruesome work again, now joined by its twin, coating his fingers in the inky substance that flows endlessly from the wound he tears into.
He won’t accept this outcome. There has to be a way, a final gambit or a twist of fate he can exploit. He’ll turn himself inside out and bleed completely dry if he has to.
And then, Yuuji’s hands clasp around his wrists, stopping him.
The touch is startling. And yet soft and steadying, as though Yuuji is trying to ground him, to coax him back from the brink of his frenzy.
Sukuna freezes, involuntarily halting his motions at the unexpected contact. His fingers tremble above the gaping wound in his chest and for a moment, the world seems to narrow to the point of their connection.
His hands are so warm. Sukuna balks at the sensation but is promptly pulled back into Yuuji's personal space, closer than they were before. So close their foreheads touch and their noses brush against each other.
“We’ll try again. And again and again. However many times it takes.”
Sukuna’s mind picks up its breakneck pace again, searching for a way out, but the nothingness around him presses in. A futile struggle, it whispers. Give in.
“You—you can’t leave me here.” Sukuna’s voice falters with a crack of uncertainty. His missing heart gives an uncomfortable jolt as images of himself invade his mind, uprooted and marooned in this nothing-space. It is nothing like his first imprisonment within the brat. Back then, he had the prospect of escape. Now, he is at the mercy of this child's whims.
“I suppose you’re right.” The scenery shifts and the oppressive void shapes itself into a small space, familiar in a way it should not be. They are in a room now, warm, ordinary, comforting. A child’s room. “I used to sleep here when I was little. It’ll be comfortable enough for you.”
And indeed, it is. It grates against his pride, the way a weight eases off his chest. A place so foreign to Sukuna that he rejects it on pure instinct. Like a petulant child, he flicks his hand and a wave of Dismantles rushes through the room. It disintegrates in an instant and then, impossibly, it begins to reassemble itself just as quickly as it dissolved.
Unfazed by Sukuna’s temper, Yuuji watches his outburst with patient amusement.
“You're a curse, are you not?” He taunts with a lightness in his voice that makes Sukuna’s chest tighten with irritation. “So curse me a bit, uncle.”
Sukuna's hand shoots up again, flat palm pointing at Yuuji's face.
“Scale of the dragon,” he begins the incantation but Yuuji just stands there, unperturbed, and shoves his hands in his pockets. Sukuna sees plainly that he believes that no amount of resistance will change the fact that Sukuna is trapped here. In a small and comforting room, surrounded by memories of a life he despises.
“Recoil.”
Deep inside, he knows it'll fail. This brat's soul is unshakeable. He knows. Intimately.
The room, this space, is something far beyond Sukuna’s power to dismantle. It exists on Yuuji’s terms, within the confines of his soul, and no amount of brute force will change that.
“Twin met— ah...”
Sukuna's frustration finally gives way to resigned disbelief and the accumulated power at the tips of his fingers vanishes. He can feel the walls of Yuuji's soul around his own, cradled in its unyielding and yet gentle grasp. It serves nothing to loosen the chains of his resentment, or lead him to path of begrudging acceptance but—
“You'll be buried with me. Best make peace with that reality if you don't want to spend our life being miserable.”
“Our life?” Sukuna spits. “You only have one because of me! All these things you relish; your breath, your worthless little friends, your power–you owe them to me.”
“I know. And I intend to pay you back.”
“Then release me, fool.”
“No. I—I don’t want to.”
“I won’t change. There will be no reconciliation. No redemption—you have mutilated your soul and made it a wretched seedbed for agony and misery for absolutely nothing. You’ll be dragging dead weight around with you until you, too, become its manure.”
“Then I’ll do just that. Don’t be so upset, you’re not that heavy.”
His flippancy is infuriating but Sukuna refuses to think too hard about the implications, what it means that the brat had carved an alcove into the meat of his soul just for him. He has no choice but to settle into it, like stubborn tears into the hollow of the throat.
*
“Take care.”
Ieiri's smoke break is over. She exhales one final plume and flicks the remnants of her cigarette to the ground, crushing the butt under her heel. Yuuji offers her a brief nod, and she turns to head back inside, leaving him alone to ponder the night.
Yuuji sits on the steps and glances down at his own cigarette clutched between his fingers, the glow of its ember staring back at him. It’s a silent recompense from Ieiri after a job well done. She'd stuck it into his pocket behind Ijichi's back. His hand tingles as he twists his wrist and turns the cigarette over to inspect the glow more closely and it sparks a memory of a far more devastating incident in his mind.
He remembers the heat of the flames that had danced across his flesh. When Sukuna had taken control and nocked the arrow that unleashed the inferno that razed city block to the ground. Yuuji swears he can feel the ghost of that heat on his skin, the way it had licked at his skin, threatening to scorch and consume his body as well.
A part of him recoils at the horror of what had been done through him. But… the part that is home to Sukuna is satisfied by the beauty of it.
This ember now in his hand seems pitiful in comparison.
His fingers tighten around the cigarette, and he turns his wrist again to lift the butt to his lips. He inhales deeply, the tip flaring, before he exhales again.
The acrid taste hits him and he almost grimaces when Sukuna's displeasure stirs in him. His disgust bleeds into Yuuji’s own senses and amplifies the bitter taste until it’s nearly intolerable.
“How vile…” Sukuna’s voice drips with venom as he drawls. “This is what you choose to put in your body?”
Yuuji ignores him and weathers the wave of revulsion that tears through him as he takes another drag. The unsettling blend of their clashing sensations saturating their bond is an unforeseen side effect, but it’s something Yuuji is more than willing to endure. He’ll bear it. He is the only one who can.
“What did you smoke back in the day? Was it different?”
He waits for a response. A heavy silence stretches out and Yuuji feels Sukuna's presence retreating into the depths of his soul. It’s nothing unexpected. A man as ancient and powerful as Sukuna, who had once commanded flames that could reduce cities to ash… The thought of him indulging in such a trivial vice is almost laughable. Or is he just spoiled? Used to a flavor that has been rendered extinct over the century? Or is he antagonizing him on purpose?
Yuuji flicks the ash from the cigarette, watching as it crumbles into nothing.
Yuuji doesn’t mind the silence. The distance Sukuna keeps, his refusal to respond is a silent assertion of the vanishing authority over the power he clings to. But Yuuji knows that one day, the chasm that separates their existences will be reduced to nothing. Like ash.
Sukuna may be beyond his comprehension, but he will make sure Sukuna will comprehend him.
*
Yuuji picks up a box of instant ramen and sighs as he puts it back again. Fushiguro hovers somewhere nearby, having wandered off to another aisle in search of something more specific and purposeful, no doubt.
His finger taps absentmindedly at the box as he lets his thoughts roam aimlessly.
“Hey,” he mutters under his breath. “Whaddaya wanna eat today?”
Usually, he keeps a tighter leash on Sukuna when he’s around Fushiguro. Less because of Sukuna himself, and more because of his friend’s eerily accurate perception of his moods. Sukuna is his dirty little secret, after all, and he can’t let it show in his face that he is still alive and haunting the deepest crevices of his being.
And Sukuna’s presence coils inside him like a lethargic serpent, momentarily caught off guard that Yuuji would consider him in such a mundane context.
But the silence that follows is thick and spiteful.
That’s fine, Yuuji thinks. He can work with thick and spiteful.
“You tasted like cranberry juice. Maybe I’ll go get some.”
A triumphant smile tugs at Yuuji’s lips when the heat of Sukuna’s irritation blooms hot and heavy in his chest. There is something else mixed in his reaction, something that makes the apples of Yuuji’s cheeks tingle. A gratifying hint of mortification from the other side.
“Tch. You are so helpless without me.”
The sound of Sukuna’s mean drawl pulls at Yuuji’s gut and sends a shiver running over his spine. It’s drenched with Sukuna’s annoyance but the edge of it is almost playful—but dangerous, like the nick of a knife across an artery. Perhaps the prospect of food had softened his attitude from a blazing hellfire into a slightly less calamitous mood.
“Yup, I am. If the King of Curses had the choice, what would he choose between instant ramen and dino nuggets?”
As soon as the words leave his lips, Yuuji freezes. Sukuna hisses something vitriolic back at him, but Yuuji barely listens. He’s too preoccupied with the sudden wave of the realization that washes over him.
When he welcomed Sukuna back into his body, he’d been resolved to engage with him beyond hostility. And yet, Yuuji had never asked if Sukuna had a favorite dish, a favorite dessert. It’s so silly and banal that Yuuji wants to cringe and laugh it off, but all of the sudden, it becomes the most important thing in the world.
“Hey,” he urges. “I mean it. What do you want to eat? Anything you want to try? I'll make it for you.”
It’s this flare of compassion that chases Sukuna back to the dark and lends Yuuji the impulse to push further.
“What did you used to like?” His voice is barely audible.
Sukuna is said to be a cannibal. But he only knows this from other people’s accounts and not the man himself. Surely he likes other things.
The clatter of Fushiguro dropping something into their cart upends his concentration, dragging him to the present, and he quickly busies himself. Now that he has a goal in mind, he ditches the instant ramen and dino nuggets and elects to go for fresh ingredients.
He makes sure to get the cranberry juice, too, and Sukuna is treated to the harrowing kindness of Yuuji’s cooking. It’s decent, good even, and Yuuji knows it.
“If you don't want to tell me, we'll keep trying different things until I know.”
He drags Sukuna forth from the deep recesses he prowls and manifests his mouth on his palm. It bares its teeth at him, canines sharp and aching to rip and tear.
“Your pitiful offerings mean nothing to me.”
“You know I’ll force it down your throat if I have to.”
It's a futile struggle for Sukuna. Yuuji is his preordained jailer, after all. And with satisfaction, Yuuji welcomes the warmth of a good meal that spreads in Sukuna and filters through their bond.
Sukuna can’t hide his repulsion, but he can’t hide his appreciation, either.
"There," Yuuji murmurs. "I knew there had to be something."
*
Bloodshed defines Sukuna’s existence. No, that isn’t quite right. The blood is merely a byproduct of the ceremony; decoration at best, a bothersome stain at worst.
The essence of carnage may be intertwined with Sukuna but it is the rapture of combat that defines his existence.
Yuuji remembers how they had fought, clutching at one another like besotted lovers.
He knows Sukuna’s power intimately, knows the depths of its appetite. It is engraved in the meat of his brain, seared into his core with every clash they have shared, and has permanently altered the flow of his synapses. It is not at all farfetched to claim that it had changed his body on a molecular level.
It is little wonder, then, that it had started to cross some wires, too.
The stars swathe Yuuji in their light as he struggles with a large curse, its immense weight bearing down on him. Massive limbs thrash wildly in the air and Yuuji’s muscles strain under the pressure, his grip on its rubbery flesh tightening as he conjures another bout of strength to push it off. The curse’s fetid breath washes over him, its gaping maw dripping with viscous saliva, and he grimaces.
But it’s not what is distracting him.
“Fuck…” He hesitates to use his Cleave on it.
“You fool,” Sukuna’s voice growls in his mind. “Deal with it.”
“You’re distracting me!”
Yuuji grits his teeth and pushes at the creature, lifts it up enough to fold his knees and kick it off balance.
In one fluid motion, he’s on his feet, fist clenched and poised to strike. But that’s the sort of approach that had landed him beneath the thing in the first place, and it quickly charges at him the second it regains its footing.
Yuuji throws himself into the thick of it and clashes with the beast. His blows land with thundering impacts but its hide absorbs them like a sponge, growing larger and fatter the more he feeds it with them.
It’s no use. He has to pierce it, and then split it apart like fruit. It's ripe for it, putrid juice pushing to be released. Yuuji’s throat tenses as he swallows the saliva pooling in his mouth.
Ever since he had taken Sukuna back, every use of his technique runs through his veins like a dark and icy river, leading him to places he never intended to go. Certainly not in the middle of a battle.
It’s intoxicating, to feel their souls coalesce and thrum in his gut, to feel an eager hunger rising alongside his adrenaline.
“You’re getting this worked up from a little tussle?”
“No,” Yuuji hisses, valiantly ignoring how quickly his cock thickens at the sound of Sukuna’s amused jeer. It’s mutual and that’s the fucking problem; Sukuna’s roused heartbeat echoes his own. “You are.”
The mocking trill of Sukuna’s laughter pours over him like ice. Like ice if it burned. Goosebumps break out over his skin at the same time liquid heat gathers in the pit of his stomach.
“Hardly. Although it is the most exciting thing that has happened in a while.”
Unbidden, images of Sukuna flash in Yuuji’s mind, his large and unbridled form looming over him, pinning his wrists to the ground as his other set of hands settles around his waist. The biting edge of his Cleaves rakes into his skin and he sucks in a sharp breath at the pain-pleasure curling in his gut that makes him want to cant his hips up in need of friction.
“Cease your antics and kill it.” The bored tone does little to conceal the eagerness in Sukuna’s voice. Whether he's itching for a fight or a fuck, though, Yuuji can’t tell.
It's probably both.
The curse howls and snaps at him, maw ripping open to reveal rows of razor-sharp teeth. Yuuji barely manages to wrench his arm away as it lunges forward and its jaws snatch closed around nothing.
“This thing has the right idea,” Sukuna comments, and his cresting impatience spills into Yuuji’s own mood. “Barely sentient and yet its mental faculties are more developed than yours.”
In Shinjuku, Yuuji had used Sukuna’s technique plenty of times without eliciting these strong reactions in himself, and until now, the reverberations of Sukuna’s hunger for battle had certainly been disruptive but manageable. “Are you—riling me up on purpose?!”
Sukuna retreats with a tch and something mean poisons Yuuji’s tongue as he tenderizes the curse’s flesh with kicks and punches.
“Must be pretty pent-up, aren’t you? How inconsiderate of me.” Admittedly, when he swallowed Sukuna’s dispersing vestiges and hooked the wisps of his consciousness to his own, Yuuji hadn't really put much thought into how that part of cohabitating the same body would go.
Whenever he took care of himself, Yuuji had shut Sukuna off to afford himself at least some measure of privacy. He’d viewed it as a kindness but it had never occurred to him that the man needed his own release, too.
He drags him to the forefront of his mind, makes sure he is present for this. Makes sure he feels it as though he were doing it himself. “Come on, we’ll fix this.”
Fingers splay as his flat palm meets the skin of the flailing curse and as the cursed energy surges in response to his bidding, a grin that is not quite his own melts through Yuuji’s face like blood through cloth. The curse roars and presses its massive body harder against his hand, but Yuuji is almost detached from the immediate danger, caught in the relief that floods his system.
And in the next moment, a thrill rends his core and then the beast falls apart in perfectly even slices. They disintegrate into nothingness before they can hit the ground.
Yuuji’s shoulders slump as he sighs, pulse roaring in his ears.
“There we go,” Sukuna says, rough and heated in a way that goes straight to Yuuji’s dick. An insistent ache spreads in his groin.
We? Yuuji’s heart thuds so desperately he wants to cry.
He stumbles back until his back hits a tree trunk, hands picking idly at his clothes as he thinks. The adrenaline that still courses through his body has him in its throes, and he needs release. In fact, he needs more.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I made it clear,” Yuuji says as he grasps the hem of his hoodie, pulls it up and puts it between his teeth. His abdomen trembles and flexes as it’s exposed to the air but the fiery blush spreading over his body makes up for it. “We’re going to fix your problem.”
“You’re the one who has problems, boy.”
“Yeah?” Yuuji delights in Sukuna’s shock as he undoes his fly and grasps his aching cock. It gives an eager jerk at the contact and he exhales another relieved sigh. His hand moves slowly at first, teasing tentatively along his length.
“But you liked that, huh? Imagined you were above me and holding me down, forcing me to take whatever you give me.” He doesn't know why such filth suddenly pours from his mouth so unhindered. Doesn't know if he says it for Sukuna's benefit or his own. Doesn't know if the distinction even matters now. “Must suck for you to be at someone else's mercy for once, right? You'll know that when you do take me it's because I allowed it.”
Sukuna bristles at him but Yuuji feels the answering throb of his pleasure as he lets his thumb brush over the head of his cock to slick it up with his precum on each pull. Their connection peels to expose their conduit like an open nerve and he moans, hips swaying into the coil of his hand.
“God, you have no idea how—maybe I will get you your body, your real body, and we can—”
“You’re hardly a platter worth a glance. Utterly undeserving of my cutlery.”
“I’d believe you if I didn’t know that—fuck.”
A searing flash sparks behind his eyes and Yuuji’s breath hitches as he feels Sukuna’s arousal mingle with his own. At the worst of times, their feelings clash so horribly that he has to force him deeper into his mind. But when they are in harmony… his hand moves faster now, grip tightening as he strokes himself with newfound urgency.
"If you didn't know what?" Sukuna's voice is low, dangerous, and it sends a fresh bout of shivers arcing along his spine. He sounds more like he is issuing a threat than for clarification. "Finish your sentence, boy."
"If I didn't know how badly you want this too. How badly you want me."
Sukuna's fury and desire crash over him like a wave. It only spurs him on further, his hips bucking into his fist as he chases his release.
"You're mine," Yuuji pants, surprising himself with the possessiveness in his voice. "My body, my rules. But if you play along, I’ll give you anything you need.”
An intense pulse of rage flares in his gut and it pushes him over the edge.
*
His body is Sukuna’s sarcophagus, braving stygian waters as they steer towards the brink of the total unknown.
“What if, one day, you’ll turn into me?”
“Not happening. We’re too different for that.”